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Scientists Calculate Carbon Emissions of Your Sandwich (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: It's a staple of the British diet and a popular choice for a quick and easy lunch. But new research reveals the carbon footprint of the humble sandwich could be fuelling harmful greenhouse emissions. The worst offender is revealed as the ready-made "all-day breakfast" sandwich, crammed with egg, bacon and sausage. Researchers at the University of Manchester carried out the first ever study of the carbon footprint of sandwiches -- both home-made and ready-made. They considered the entire life cycle of sandwiches, including the production of ingredients, packaging, refrigeration and food waste. The team scrutinised 40 different sandwich types, recipes and combinations and found the highest carbon footprints for the sandwiches containing pork meat (bacon, ham or sausages) and also those filled with cheese or prawns. The researchers estimate that a ready-made (and highly calorific) all-day breakfast sandwich generates 1441g of carbon dioxide equivalent -- equal to the emissions created by driving a car for 12 miles (19km).
As a food source, calorie for calorie, meat is way more resource-intensive than pants.
Bullshit. You may need more of x resources to get a given amount (by weight) of meat than you would with plants, but you get all that back out at the end. It's a closed-loop. The most common comparison I see is for water. Water doesn't disappear when you use it to grow crops to feed to livestock to butcher for meat.
Even if you imagine that pigs and cows and chickens are unnecessary middlemen for the human diet, where are they taking their cut from, exactly? Does a slaughtered pig abscond to piggy heaven with a gallon of water and a small plot of land? Or does the whole damn thing get reincorporated into the environment in one way or another?
Meat is vastly more nutritious than plants are, meat is critical for human development, and meat is delicious. If you don't like it, don't eat it. Meat isn't doing you any harm. And if you're worried about the rest of us not having enough water or land to raise livestock to keep up with our current diets, you can relax. If we ever get to such a point it will self-correct via economic pressures well before anyone has to go hungry for lack of production. And even if we somehow got to that point, you'll be there to show us all how to eat shitty vegetables like kale and quinoa and enjoy the resulting hard poops interspersed with pockets of the foulest gases imaginable.
As for your sandwich... It's probably one of the first foods that will start using artificial ingredients. Well, butter began being replaced long ago, but soon meat and probably cheese will be too.
Here in Finland its illegal to sell and advertize american cheese as cheese because its at best a "cheeselike substance"